Many business-to-business (B2B) vendors claim to be “Web Services Enabled” because they accept extended markup language (XML) messages packaged inside Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages sent over HTTP. They might even expose a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interface to their partners. Companies that accomplish these practices have taken a step toward becoming web services shops, but have not fulfilled the potential of web services interoperability.
What is clearly needed is a language that is powerful enough to communicate business documents and versatile enough for trading partners to rapidly integrate with their own systems, so that trading partners can agree on the meaning of the messages they exchange to conduct business, not only just their method of exchange.